Smart Toys

From early in life, Mitchel Resnick was interested in building things.

Take the time he and his friends grew bored with the local miniature golf course because they had to play by its rules. “We decided that if we built our own course, we could make up our own rules,” he says. So — with a go-ahead from his parents — he did build one, right in his backyard in suburban Philadelphia.

These days Resnick, now an associate professor of media arts and sciences, is still building things. His current creations, though, aren’t for himself but for kids.

Children have always learned by playing, but Resnick is taking advantage of the computer revolution to develop a unique set of toys and learning tools. One goal is to let children design and build their own creations. Another, closely related, is to enhance the learning process. The idea, explains Resnick, is that “as children learn to use these new toys and tools, they explore a new set of concepts.”

An early product, created by Resnick and a colleague with guidance from Media Lab legend Seymour Papert, was LEGO/Logo. This system pairs a computer language simple enough for kids to use with the Lego Group’s interlocking toy bricks. It thus allows children, with some guidance, to build robots and other objects, and control them using customized programs on a desktop computer.

For inner-city kids

The group deployed LEGO/Logo at local schools. Resnick still works with schools today, but has also helped found “computer clubhouses” in Boston and elsewhere to make his creations available to kids from economically deprived backgrounds.

Those initial tests of LEGO/Logo validated the MIT group’s basic approach. For example, says Resnick, “we found that when kids came up with multiple designs for their constructions, they got a better understanding of how design works.”

LEGO/Logo is now in use in some 20,000 schools nationwide. But the march of technological progress has allowed Resnick’s group to create a toy chest full of other learning tools.

Some, like Logo, are computer programs. A language called StarLogo, for example, lets users program hundreds or even thousands of “agents” — actually, small dots on the computer monitor — to do specific things. Thus, one young experimenter programmed hundreds of “termites” to buzz around the screen building or dismantling “piles of woodchips” in accord with simple rules he’d chosen for himself.

Resnick says computer simulations are good for certain types of learning activities. “If I want to build little robotic creatures, I might be able to build two or three, or even a dozen of them,” he notes, “but I’m not going to build 1,000. On the computer, I can create 5,000 agents if I want to.”

Programmable toys

His group, though, also creates tools kids can build right into their inventions. An example is the cricket, a computer processor not much larger than the nine-volt battery that powers it.

The cricket is an advanced version of what Resnik calls “programmable bricks.” “Kids can connect sensors and motors to the cricket,” explains Resnick. “Then, they can write programs for it on a regular desktop computer, and can download the programs to the cricket using infrared signals. In this way, kids can use crickets to control machines, robots, or whatever else they want to build.”

Kayty Himelstein used two crickets to help create a bird-monitoring device. Kayty, a nine-year-old from Cambridge, wanted to find out what colors birds like best. So, she built a device that includes a long perch that can dip slightly, a place to hang small banners of various colors, and a bird-food container.

Kayty programmed one cricket to trigger a camera when it senses the perch has moved. The other gives numerical reports on bird arrivals. “If you touch two wires together on the cricket,” says Kayty, “it beeps the number of birds that have landed.

“In building this device, Kayty explored a range of new concepts, including the nature of a camera’s focal length,” says Resnick. “And by working on other creations, kids can learn other types of concepts.”

Thus, some children have built robots programmed to use sensors to distinguish light from dark, and to move “instinctively” toward one or the other. In creating such devices, says Resnick, “kids find that they can’t do that much with these artificial sensors, and then they start to understand how rich our own senses are.”

Many lessons

Watching children use his tools at the computer clubhouses and elsewhere has taught Resnick himself some lessons, one being that kids like to put their own stamp on things. When LEGO/Logo was launched, he notes, he quickly learned that its youthful users weren’t always content to create devices like robots and cars.

“They used it to fulfill their fantasies,” says Resnick. “For example, one built a kinetic sculpture designed so that when you got near it, it would start spinning around and around.”

“What I realized,” he says, “is that there are multiple pathways to learning about important concepts.” He also discovered that the inventiveness of children makes his work more fun. “We’re constantly surprised by the types of things kids do with what we put in their hands.”

(http://www.media.mit.edu/~mres/)

by Richard Anthony

On Topic: education+teaching, faculty, media lab